Evening Brief: Friday, September 5, 2014

Tonight’s Evening Brief is brought to you by RBC. It All Adds Up is a youth financial literacy program developed by RBC and Free the Children, providing practical lessons on earning, saving, giving and spending to help youth create the change they want to see in the world.

In this long pre-election tryout season, the federal Tories are already honing their dirty tricks repertoire, with the latest planted agent provocateur having ensnared former general and Liberal hopeful in Ottawa-Orleans Andrew Leslie. As CP reports, the Conservatives are no longer content to send observers to rival parties’ public events, passively monitoring proceedings in hopes of spotting a gaffe that can be exploited. They’re now employing plants who actively try to instigate a miscue, secretly record it and then leak it to the media. On Leslie’s impolitic comments on Gaza, Conservative spokesman Cory Hann enthusiastically eschewed the high road. “What the Liberals are really upset about is that they were caught having one of Trudeau’s top advisers deliver anti-Israel messages to certain segments of the Canadian public,” Hann told CP. “I can see why the Liberals don’t want it known that a senior Liberal MP thinks Justin Trudeau is a bozo and in over his head.”

Finance Minister Joe Oliver told the Durham Region Chamber of Commerce Friday that the Harper government’s projected $6 billion surplus isn’t going to result in “reckless” new spending. After reciting a list of federal spending programs benefiting the region, which includes his predecessor Jim Flaherty’s old riding of Whitby-Oshawa, Oliver warned, “Our government will not engage in reckless new spending schemes that would lead to higher taxes, higher debt, or both.” (For an alternate prediction on the upcoming surplus budget’s effect on Tory comportment, see this unattributed quote in John Ivison’s latest column in the National Post:“There will be enough money to say ‘yes’ to everyone,” said one senior Conservative. “It will be like everyone in caucus has taken a tab of ecstasy — they’re going to be feeling great.”)